Word Finder - declamation

definition

The act or art of declaiming; rhetorical delivery; loud speaking in public.

synonyms

• haranguing

definition

A set or harangue; declamatory discourse.

definition

Pretentious rhetorical display, with more sound than sense.

example

mere declamation

For cool and sustained declamation he stood unrivalled in parliament, and his readiness in debate was universally acknowledged.

Cobden did the reasoning, Bright supplied the declamation, but like Demosthenes he mingled argument with appeal.

Several years after the death of Socrates the sophist Polycrates composed a declamation against him, to which Lysias replied.

This didactic view of history was a prevalent one in antiquity, and it was confirmed no doubt by those rhetorical studies which in Rome as in Greece formed the chief part of education, and which taught men to look on history as little more than a storehouse of illustrations and themes for declamation.

The splendid declamation of Camille, and the excellent part of the elder Horace, do not altogether atone for these defects.

In Pompee (for La Mort de Pompee, though the more appropriate, was not the original title) the splendid declamation of Cornelie is the chief thing to be remarked.

The real point of this superb declamation was Burke's conviction that ministers supported the claims of the fraudulent creditors in order to secure the corrupt advantages of a sinister parliamentary interest.

Accomplished men of letters, such as Julius Vestinus and Aelius Dionysius, selected from his writings choice passages for declamation or perusal, of which fragments are incorporated in the miscellany of Photius and the lexicons of Harpocration, Pollux and Suidas.

One is that they deal too much in mere declamation, without any reference to a connected train of reasoning.

Wagner effected vast changes in almost every branch of his all-embracing art, from theatrebuilding and stage-lighting to the musical declamation of words.

We find now only imitative echoes of the old music created by Virgil and others, as in Statius, or powerful declamation, as in Lucan and Juvenal.

The old oratorical tastes and aptitudes find their outlet in public recitations and the practice of declamation.

Diderot indeed is credited with a third of this work, which was characterized by Voltaire as "du rechauffe avec de la declamation."

Joseph was also required each day to write a Latin theme or declamation, though in other respects he seems to have been left to his own devices.

To appreciate them we must take them for what they are, pieces of declamation, intended either to enliven the course of the narrative, to place vividly before the reader the feelings and aims of the chief actors, or more frequently still to enforce some lesson which the author himself has at heart.

Especially in his later plays a verse and a couplet will crash out with fulgurous brilliancy, and then be succeeded by pages of very second-rate declamation or argument.

But we shall also find that, even if we could conceive the poetry to be a perfect expression of all that can be given in words and actions, the orchestra will express something greater; it will not run parallel with the poetry; the Leitmotif system will not be a collection of labels; the musical expression of singer and orchestra will not be a mere heightened resource of dramatic declamation.

Voltaire makes an interesting observation on the technical difference between an English and a French sermon in the 18th century; the former, he says, is a solid and somewhat dry dissertation which the preacher reads to the congregation without a gesture and without any inflection of his voice; the latter is a long declamation, scrupulously divided into three points, and recited by heart with enthusiasm.

He did good by moderating the revolutionary and destructive ardour of the Parisian populace in 1848; but he had been perhaps more responsible than any other single person for bringing about the events of that year by the vague and frothy republican declamation of his Histoire des Girondins.

For the stately declamation, the sonorous, and beyond a doubt impressive, chant of Quin and his fellows, Garrick substituted rapid changes of passion and humour in both voice and gesture, which held his audiences spellbound.

Dumont was a Genevese exile, and an old friend of Romilly's, who willingly prepared for him those famous addresses which Mirabeau used to make the Assembly pass by sudden bursts'of eloquent declamation; Claviere helped him in finance, and not only worked out his figures, but even wrote his financial discourses; Lamourette wrote the speeches on the civil constitution of the clergy; Reybaz not only wrote for him his famous speeches on the assignats, the organization of the national guard, and others, which Mirabeau read word for word at the tribune, but even the posthumous speech on succession to the estates of intestates, which Talleyrand read in the Assembly as the last work of his dead friend.

When we listen to the free declamation of the singers at the outset of Der fliegende Hollander - a declamation which is accompanied by 1 The subsequent division into three acts, as given in all the published editions, has been effected in the crudest way by inserting a full close in the orchestral interludes at the changes of scene, and then beginning the next scene by taking up the interludes again.